We had what was probably our last meeting at IRN-BRU's Parkhead head office the other day. They're moving to their state of the art bottling plant in Cumbernauld.
We recorded the event for posterity.
We couldn't get into the usual meeting room because of preparations for the move, so we found ourselves in this subterranean room off the loading bay. It was the A G Barr version of Churchill's War Rooms with various sales area maps all over the walls.
It was also clearly the secret Overhead Projector Graveyard (you can see one of them in the background). This was where all the OHP's came to die. No-one saw them go but they made their way somehow, like elephants, to this ancestoral burial ground.
Seeing all these OHP's reminded me of an idea I had a while back for a piece of software to plug into Powerpoint. This software would recreate on Powerpoint slides all the endearing quirks of working with OHP acetates.
So, as you make your presentation, random hairs and fingerprint smudges appear on your slides.
As you click between charts they sometimes appear to float and slide, coming to rest at an odd angle, the way that acetates used to once the OHP bulb got hot.
Every now again (on the Russian Roulette setting) a slide will start to turn brown and appear to melt. The content of your chart is irrevocably lost as various melt holes get bigger and join up.
The software also gives you an additional option for building bullet point charts. Instead of just appearing they are revealed one by one by a feature that mimics the effect of a piece of paper being pulled away. This feature comes with a further "nervous shaking hand effect" option. This recreates the way that OHP's would magnify the slightest nervous shake to an extent that was impossible not to notice. A nervous reveal also ran the risk of dragging the acetate out of position as the paper was moved downwards - and this can also happen to your Powerpoint slide on this setting.
This software would be great for presentations to people over the age of 35. Whereas I realise that there are people in the agency who won't have the slightest idea what I'm talking about.